“No Palestinian leadership could accept this demand and survive,” concludes Whitbeck, adding, “Israelis know that. That is why the demand is being made.”
He then proceeds to make fun of an imagined Israeli move to change its name to “Jewish Israel,” pushing the point that our entire interest in having a Jewish state is so we’d be able to push Arabs around. What the Palestinians should do instead, Whitebeck advises, is say they have nothing to say about what Israel is. “Israel’s preferred self-identification and official name are not matters in which the State of Palestine has any role to play.”
Clever and misleading. Because the Jewish character of Israel never was a matter about which we expected Arab recognition. That we recognize our own Jewish status is not the issue here at all. The issue is, instead, that our neighbors, with whom the world wants us to sign a peace agreement at great cost to us, would recognize our right to live here as a Jewish state; that they declare they no longer have any claims on our part of the land; that they are now satisfied with what they have and are prepared for a hundred years of peaceful coexistence.
We would like to know that this is it, our war is over.
And that, Whitebeck and his clients will never be willing to give us.
This is why Jews will not be allowed to live in the Palestinian state. This is why the negotiations are not over reparations for Arab refugees but only about a return.
In the end, loike every antisemite, John V. Whitebeck doesn’t want us to have peace with his clients. He wants us dead.